can’t move back from France right now. We’re in the middle of a start-up project which has taken months to get into place.”
“I don’t remember asking you to return.” She told herself it didn’t hurt that he wasn’t more amazed by the miracle which had happened. She didn’t still love him. Would fight against loving him with everything in her broken heart. “Weekend visitation is all but impossible two continents apart. Don’t worry. These are my children.”
“And you expect me to walk out of their lives?”
A wheelchair was brought in. The nurse helped her into it. “Would you like to hold the babies, Ms. Brady? For the cameras?”
“Forget the cameras! This family is not going to be fodder for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, or Guinness Book, or whatever publicity stunt you’re pulling. And the last name of those infants is Winston.”
Maddie ignored the growl she remembered so well from the moment their marriage had begun to unravel. She was thirty-eight, and wanted children. He was forty-two, and hadn’t felt the need the way she had. He was happy. She had not been. “Yes, please hand me the boys.”
“Does using your maiden name not embarrass you? For them?” Glancing at the names on the ankle bands, he read, “Henry. Hayden.” He grunted. “As much as I appreciate you at least naming these boys with our fathers’ middle names, my name had better be on the birth certificates.”
She smiled down into her babies’ sleeping faces. “You’re on there, Sam. If you’ll excuse me, we need to return to filming.”
“Filming? You’re a movie star, now that you’ve robbed the bank?”
A stinging retort was on the tip of her tongue, but the nurse thrust the wheelchair handles into Sam’s hands. “Mr. Winston, the reporters said that it would be a great touch if you pushed Ms. Brady out to the curb.”
“Reporters be damned!”
“Interesting French you picked up while you were abroad,” Maddie murmured.
“How do you expect me to feel?” he gritted out.
“Like a happy father?”
“I don’t think so.”
She could practically hear him grinding his teeth as he pushed her past a throng of people, clapping and waving at them as if they had done something special. Of course they had. This whole staff had invested their hopes and future medical hopes on her and her special babies.
“You only have to put up with us until you leave again,” she said to him in a whisper, unable to hide a trace of bitterness.
“Did I say anything about leaving again?”
“I assume you will. Foreign investments and all that.” She waved to a couple of nurses who had showed her how to bathe the tiny babies. And how to feed and care for them, one at a time and sometimes both at once.
“You’ll need help. I don’t see how I can go back for a while.”
“Order your one-way ticket, Sam. Since your parents moved next door to me, I have all the help I need. Plus Joey’s almost out of college for the summer, and is planning on helping in between football camps.”
He stopped the chair at the curb, putting the brake on before stepping in front of it. “Did you say my parents moved in next to you?”
“Last month. Didn’t they tell you?”
“Not exactly. They said they were moving to a warmer climate, someplace where the winters weren’t quite as cold. I thought that was a great idea. But I was thinking South Padre, not Austin.”
“Oh, well,” she said brightly. “Austin is so much better than Amarillo, as far as they’re concerned.”
“I guess so.”
She could tell he was very nonplussed by his parents’ choice of residence. In a way she felt sorry for him. He was the last person on the planet who’d known about the babies. “My parents live on the other side, in the Reefer’s old house,” she said softly, as he helped her into the waiting limo the hospital had ordered. She had to speak softly because reporters were still running tape, the Maitlands were still smiling, blue carnations in green paper were pressed into her hand—and she so much wanted to appear like a normal family. No matter how much they weren’t.
“Anything else you’d like to enlighten me on? Maybe just when you felt like I needed to know?”
She sensed his hurt and understood. “Would you like to ride with us?”
“I may as well,” he muttered. “We’re enough of a spectacle as it is.”
“I prefer to think of it as a circus. Active, bright, colorful, cheery. That’s our family tree.”
“That’s not how I’d describe a circus.”
She stared at the babies which were securely in car seats, one next to each parent. “Wave,” she instructed. “With a big smile. Maitland Maternity has given us a future.”
She waved madly, smiling from the limo window as the car pulled away. Sam eschewed the all-is-right-with-the-world appearance. Absolutely nothing was right in his world.
He saw the delighted smile brightening his wife’s pixie face, eyes glowing with happiness and pride as she called thanks to everyone on the hospital sidewalk waving goodbye to them—and knew nothing had been right since he’d left.
He missed the hell out of her. Unfortunately it didn’t seem she felt the same way. She had everything she’d ever wanted now—and more.
“CAN YOU HEAR anything?” Sara Winston asked Franny Brady, who had her ear pressed to a glass held firmly against the closed bedroom door.
Tufts of Franny’s iron-gray hair stood up a bit wildly as she leaned close to listen. “It’s pretty quiet.”
“Oh. That doesn’t bode well.” Sara pursed her lips. “Maybe Sam doesn’t like the new decor. It’s possible we went a teensy bit overboard with the Miami look.”
Franny shook her head. “Maddie needed decorating with attitude. It lifted her spirits considerably.”
“Has he gone into the bathroom yet?”
“I haven’t heard any howls. Guaranteed if he didn’t like the bedroom, he’ll resist the oranges-and-bananas tropical wallpaper and—”
“Shh!” Sara didn’t want to think about it. The pretty fountain they’d installed on the bathroom counter might not exactly be a hit. Of course, if they’d gotten the water to flow out of the statue’s bowl instead of shooting from the woman’s mouth, it wouldn’t be so bad. “We may have some tweaking to do here and there. But all in all, I think we did a good job.”
“Sure he’ll be proud of how much we’ve tried to do in his absence.” Franny pulled away from the door, and they went up the staircase to join the rest of the family. “Not that I mean to criticize your son, Sara. My daughter was just as much at fault.”
Grandfathers Virgil Brady and Severn Winston rocked in matching white rockers.
“Where are the babies?” Franny demanded, seeing that the grandfathers weren’t holding babies as they’d been when she’d left.
“Maddie came and got them for a bath,” Virgil answered. “She said they needed a feeding and a nap. A second later, I heard the doorbell ring. Who was it?”
“Sam,” Sara said grimly. “And he barely had a word to say to us! You’d think that boy could hug his mother after being gone so long. Not so much as the courtesy of a phone call to tell us he was coming back! But as soon as Franny told him Maddie was in their, uh, her bedroom, he headed in there so fast you would have thought bees were after him.”
Maddie’s